


A Different Outcome

by ozuttly



Category: GARO (TV), GARO: Gold Storm Sho, 神ノ牙-JINGA- | Kami no Kiba: JINGA (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, M/M, Sort Of, missing memories
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:01:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21777982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ozuttly/pseuds/ozuttly
Summary: Dougai Ryuuga has been Garo for over thirty years, and is expected to pick an apprentice to act as his successor.The one he ends up with is an unpleasant reminder of the past, and he's determined to figure out exactly what he's planning.If he's planning anything at all.
Relationships: Dougai Ryuuga/Jinga, Past Dougai Ryuuga/Rian
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't actually seen the Jinga tv show and I don't really plan to. But the premise of Jinga being reborn as a good guy is one that stuck with me so I decided to rewrite the entire series - based only on the barebones premise - the way i would want it to go. And that means Ryuuga is here.

Dougai Ryuuga has been Garo for over three decades now. 

It hardly feels real, when he thinks about it. The events of Vol City, arguably some of the most important events in his life, happened so long ago that his memories of them now are fuzzy around the edges. The finer details, things he used to recall so vividly – Rian and that fancy feather hairpiece she used to wear, his mother’s face when he killed her – are lost to him now. He isn’t sure how he feels about it all, when he sits down to think about it. But ultimately it doesn’t matter. 

He took the title of Garo expecting to hold it for his entire life, cut short undoubtedly when a horror would finally run him through. He thought he had met that horror once, years ago, back in Line City, but in the end he had prevailed, as he always did. 

He’s a bit tired of prevailing now. But he does, because he is Garo, he is the golden knight. Most importantly, he doesn’t have a successor.

Rian had tried to give him one, of course. They had tried many times, with the help of all sorts of rituals and spells, but in the end, nothing could change the fact that she was barren. Ryuuga never blamed her for it. He gets the feeling that she wishes he had. 

Their marriage hadn’t lasted through it. Ryuuga feels like it’s a fault of his that drove her away, but then, he hadn’t gone after her. If she was happier without him, then he wanted that for her. Perhaps that’s why she left. He’s stopped questioning it. 

It does leave him, though, in the unique position of having to find an heir. He’s tried, a few times, to mentor a young knight. Very often they crumble under the pressure of the Garo name, and Ryuuga can’t afford to go easy on them, so he lets them leave. And in the end, it led him here, to the hall of the watchdog and lady Ryume’s successor. 

Riel was her name. She was haughty and strict, and expected the best from those around her. Ryuuga respected her, but he couldn’t say he particularly liked her. 

“Dougai Ryuuga,” she begins, leaning back in her throne as he approaches. He nods his head to her, because as much as he’d like to take a knee like a proper knight, his joints aren’t quite what they used to be. Besides that, he expects that he knows what this summons is about, and he’d like to get it over with as soon as possible. 

“The tribune would like to ask you to apprentice another knight. He has his own title, so it is unlikely that he would continue your line. However his circumstances are… unique. We would like for you to take him under your wing, so to speak.” 

Ryuuga listens and tilts his head to the side, honestly having not expected that. He figured that this would be about a new apprenticeship, but…

“If he has a title, then he must have had a previous master,” he points out, and Riel’s face scrunches up like she’s bitten into a sour lemon. 

“His father was his master, until he became a horror and slaughtered his family,” she explains, and Ryuuga hums. Makai knights becoming horrors was not exactly common, but it wasn’t unheard of. He remembers one such case, of course, one that stands out against all the others, and he finds himself chewing on his lower lip absentmindedly.

“Very well, then,” he says, because he truly does feel sorry for the boy. To lose your family to horrors was hardly a rare occurrence, but it wasn’t an easy thing. Ryuuga did even enjoy taking apprentices, on the rare occasion that they weren’t scared stiff of him. Perhaps this would be a good experience. 

Riel smiles, but it’s tight around the edges. 

“He will meet you at your abode tomorrow, then. Be ready.” 

*** 

Ryuuga spends the night preparing. He doesn’t know how old his new apprentice is, so he isn’t quite sure what kind of things he’ll need. His last apprentice, a fifteen year old boy, had scoffed at the teddy bear he’d left for him in his room, so he doesn’t want to make assumptions about this new one just yet. 

He doubts he’d be younger than twelve. Makai knights didn’t start training until ten, and he must have spent some time with his previous master. Teenagers can be a bit hard to deal with, but Ryuuga wouldn’t be opposed to one, either. They tended to pick up on training faster than the younger kids, and he found them oftentimes easier to talk to. 

Not that he could remember being fifteen with any clarity at all, now that he’s just a year shy of fifty.

Still, he makes sure to at least dust the spare room, replace all the linens on the bed, and leave a few books on the bookshelf about varying topics. Nothing too overtly childish, but nothing too complicated, either. 

When he wakes the next morning to a knock on his door, he’s only a little bit surprised. Most makai knights aren’t exactly morning people, and judging by the light outside his window it’s only around six am. But this is a big day for his new apprentice, so he doesn’t begrudge him the hour as he rolls out of bed and hurriedly puts on his slippers to answer the door. 

As soon as he does, all of the blood in his body runs cold. 

It feels like he’s staring at his past. It feels like he’s staring at his death. The man in the doorway is wearing a makai knight’s coat instead of a trim corset, and his smile is warm rather than cunning, but Ryuuga can’t see any of that. All he can see is--

“I hope I’m not too early. It’s nice to meet you, Dougai Ryuuga. I’m--”

Ryuuga grabs his sword from where it always rests against the coat rack and unsheaths it in an instant. 

He dives at the demon in front of him – because what else could it be? He’d killed this man, killed him twice – and the devil has the gall to look surprised. 

He dodges it, though, with skills just barely duller than Ryuuga remembers them. Ryuuga turns on him and attacks again, and this time his sword is parried away. 

“Ryuuga?!” the man yelps in confusion as Ryuuga’s sword manages to finally slip past his considerably weaker guard and dig into his thigh. Ryuuga goes down with him, blade pressed to his throat as he crowds him against the side of the house, their bodies pressed together almost intimately. 

“Jinga,” Ryuuga hisses, the name coming out through clenched teeth. “How the hell are you here?” 

Jinga stares up at him, eyes wide and mouth opened into a slight ‘o’. He looks just the way that Ryuuga had remembered him, just the way he has in all the dreams he’s haunted. Except for his expression. 

He looks confused. Ryuuga has never seen Jinga look confused, or frightened, or innocent the way that he does now, his sword laying forgotten beside him. It doesn’t suit him at all, and Ryuuga snarls at him to drop the act. If anything, his confusion grows thicker. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jinga says, and when Ryuuga’s sword digs into his neck enough to draw blood, he inhales a sharp, shaky breath. “Lady Riel said that you’d be expecting me.” 

Ryuuga’s eyes widen, and for a split second his grip on his sword lessens. The blade falls down from Jinga’s neck, but the other man doesn’t draw his own sword, or try to push him away. It feels wrong, so wrong, that he had just shown weakness in front of Jinga and Jinga hadn’t taken advantage of it. 

“Expecting you? You’re dead! You’ve been dead for--” He takes in a shaky breath. It’s been twenty three years since Jinga died the second time, and he’d been maybe in his thirties then. The boy in front of him looks maybe twenty one at oldest, a roundness to his face and an innocence in his eyes that the real Jinga had never had. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jinga breathes, and god, he sounds like he’s telling the truth. Ryuuga had never heard Jinga sound sincere before. It sounds as off on his tongue as the innocence does on his face. 

Ryuuga’s hands tighten around his sword, and for a brief moment, he considers drawing it tight and ending it. If Jinga were to die again, nobody would be worse off. Anything he could have been plotting were surely malicious, and it would be so easy to end it here. 

But Jinga isn’t fighting back. He’s just looking at him, eyes open and scared, god, he’s actually scared. Ryuuga realizes it with a start, and he lets his sword fall. Jinga gulps in air the second that it’s gone. 

“Who are you?” Ryuuga asks as he stands, and Jinga watches him warily. He doesn’t reach for his own sword, as though he’s unsure what Ryuuga will do. Ryuuga is glad for it. If he had reached for his blade he wouldn’t be able to stop the reflex of cutting his throat. 

“I’m Mikage Jinga,” the man wearing Jinga’s face says, his voice wavering just the slightest bit. “I’m here to be your apprentice, until I can be a fully fledged makai knight.”


	2. Chapter 2

Ryuuga stares at Jinga for a long time. He considers his words, but doesn’t believe them for a second. 

“You’re too old to be an apprentice,” he points out. “You usually would have received your knightship by twenty.” 

He says it like he’s seen through Jinga’s big scheme, and while the blade may no longer be at Jinga’s throat, it’s still clutched firmly in Ryuuga’s hand. Jinga winces slightly at his words, but that could also be from the pain in his leg. 

“I started my training late,” he admits, not even missing a beat. “I was ill as a child, so my training didn’t start until I was thirteen. I’m set to become a full fledged knight in two years.” 

Ryuuga frowns. He wants to get his madou lighter, but he isn’t wearing his coat, and he doesn’t trust Jinga to leave him alone outside. Jinga, for his part, finally reaches for his sword, but only to put it back in its scabbard as he tries to stand up. Ryuuga tenses, but he doesn’t kill him at least. Neither does he rush to help him when he stumbles, and he watches him fall to the ground rather gracelessly. 

It’s strange, completely bizarre, to see Jinga acting like this. He’s only ever seen Jinga as a nigh unkillable monster, somebody who saunters around without care. To see him struggling from a wound that, really, isn’t all that bad, has Ryuuga frowning. 

He doesn’t believe him. He knows Jinga can be a good actor when he wants to be, and he wouldn’t put another miraculous resurrection past him. But at the same time, there are so many differences, so many things that scream at him that this can’t really be Jinga, that he ends up reaching for him anyways. 

He hauls him to his feet and helps him into the house, then sits him down at the kitchen table. He leaves the room, if only to test him, and comes back less than a minute later with his first aid kit and his madou lighter to see… Jinga still sitting obediently at the table. Ryuuga doesn’t know what he expected. For him to instantly shed his coat and don his horror form again? To tear through the house like a hurricane and ambush Ryuuga the second his back was turned?

Instead, he’s just… sitting there, like an ordinary person. It makes Ryuuga’s skin crawl. 

The very first thing he does is grab Jinga by the chin and hold the madou lighter between his eyes. Jinga looks confused, then indignant, and he glares up at Ryuuga with irritation written clearly on his face. Ryuuga welcomes it. It suits him far more than the lost puppy look he had been wearing earlier. 

“You think I’m a horror?” Jinga asks, and Ryuuga meets his stare straight on. 

“I know you’re a horror,” he snarls, and the flame dances to life between them. 

Ryuuga watches the green light reflected in Jinga’s eyes, and he waits for the symbols representing a horror’s karma to show themselves. He waits, and waits, but they don’t. All he sees is the flame reflected back at him, and his own eyes widen as he tightens his grip on Jinga’s chin. 

“Is this how you treat all your apprentices?” Jinga asks, incensed. Ryuuga doesn’t relent as he snaps the lighter shut. 

“How are you pretending to be human?” he snarls, and Jinga glares at him. He looks actually offended. 

“I am human!” he snaps, and he jerks his head out of Ryuuga’s fingers. Ryuuga stares at him, and Jinga stares back, until finally the younger man looks away and scoffs. “The tribune clearly made a mistake by sending me here. How could a delusional old man like you be Garo?” 

“Don’t say that name,” Ryuuga hisses, and for a second Jinga looks like he’s going to repeat himself just to be contrary, but he doesn’t. He looks down to his thigh, where the wound is leaking blood all over Ryuuga’s kitchen chair, and Ryuuga follows his gaze. He can hear Rian’s voice echoing in his hair, telling him he’s being incredibly stupid, but he reaches for the blood anyways, running his fingers through where it has accumulated. 

Jinga looks a little bit disgusted. Ryuuga tests the consistency of the substance between his fingers, expects to see it melt into his skin, but it doesn’t. It’s just… normal blood. Human blood. And that is something Jinga can’t fake, no matter what strange spells he’s using. 

Ryuuga is dumbfounded. He opens and closes his mouth, but the words can’t quite find their way out. Colour comes to his face, and he quickly stumbles away from Jinga’s chair, towards the sink. He stares down at his hand, at his bloody fingers, and then sucks in a deep, shaky breath. 

“I’m, I’m sorry,” he says, his words quiet. He can feel rather than see Jinga’s scowl, but he can’t focus on it. His mind is running in a million different directions, and he can’t slow it down no matter how hard he tries. He hears the rustling of fabric behind him, and he turns around just in time to see Jinga taking off his pants and laying them on the kitchen table. 

Ryuuga’s face goes red as he recalls just how many times those pale thighs had showed up in his dreams, following the events of Ladan. He quickly shakes his head and turns his eyes away. 

“What are you doing?” he asks, his voice pitched just a little higher than usual, and Jinga glowers at him. 

“I’m bandaging the wound you gave me,” he snaps, and that is a perfectly reasonable answer. He’s even got the first aid kit open. “And then I’m going back to the tribune to be reassigned.” 

Ryuuga blinks. He hadn’t actually been expecting that. He had suspected that whatever sinister deed Jinga was up to here had something to do with him, so the idea that he could be leaving without actually accomplishing it makes his head spin. All of this is making his head spin, and for a brief moment he wonders if he hasn’t just slept in later than he’d meant to and is having a very strange, unreal dream. 

The stickiness of the blood between his fingers tells him he’s awake. 

“You’re just going to leave?” Ryuuga asks, and Jinga gives him a very unimpressed look. 

“You clearly do not seem to want me here,” he points out, and Ryuuga swallows. 

“Well, you--” he begins, but stops himself. 

Would it truly be better to have Jinga leave? To have him go back to the defenseless tribune, free to cause whatever chaos there he wanted?

Or maybe, a very quiet and insidious voice in the back of Ryuuga’s head says, he really is telling the truth. Maybe Ryuuga had just attacked an innocent man, his own apprentice, based only on a chance resemblance and his own delusions. 

Ryuuga doesn’t know if he’s naive enough to believe that.

“I apologize,” he says, though he finds he can’t quite bring himself to look Jinga in the face as he does so. “I treated you unfairly. You just look like somebody...” 

He doesn’t know how to end the sentence. Jinga raises his eyebrows at him, then snorts.

“Are you saying I look like a horror?” he asks boldly, and Ryuuga bites his tongue. It has to be a trick question. But…

“You look like the strongest horror I ever faced,” Ryuuga admits, and Jinga does turn to look at him then, calculatingly. 

“Really?” he asks, and he sounds unsure. Like he hadn’t actually expected such an answer, and the truth frightens him a little. Like so many things about this strange young man, it’s so very unlike Jinga. 

Ryuuga finds himself softening a little, even though he doesn’t want to. 

“You’re not a horror, though,” he says, as though by saying it aloud he can cement it as true. Jinga huffs out a breath of air. 

“I told you, I’m human,” he says as he finishes winding the bandage around his leg and sets the first aid kit aside. “Are you perhaps going senile in your old age, Ryuuga?” 

That sounds like the old Jinga, and it’s the weird collection of similarities and differences that make him sure that he can’t let this man out of his sight. He can’t let him leave to finish his apprenticeship under another knight, one who might not be prepared for… whatever he has in store for them. 

“Did you come here because you want the Garo title?” Ryuuga asks him, and Jinga pauses. It’s only for a second, his fingers freezing from where they’re drumming along the table, but then he turns back to Ryuuga and shakes his head. 

“I don’t care about being Garo,” he says, and Ryuuga’s eyebrows rise. “I want to learn from the best teacher, to be the best makai knight. I want to save people.”

He doesn’t mention his family, but Ryuuga can see it in the way that his mouth is tight at the corners, his eyes determined, and maybe a little regretful. 

Ryuuga wants to believe him. He isn’t certain if he really does. 

“Your room is down the hall,” Ryuuga says, and Jinga gives him a quizzical look. 

“I told you I was going to be reassigned,” he reminds him. Ryuuga purses his lips. 

“If you want to leave, then leave,” he says, though he knows he won’t let him. He’s just banking on this Jinga being as arrogant and willful as he was back when he was his age, and from the way that jinga’s back straightens a little, he can tell that he has his attention. “But if you want to learn from the best, then you’ll stay.” 

Jinga meets his eyes, and oh, he can tell he’s being challenged. Ryuuga sees it in the way that his eyes sharpen ever so slightly, and how his tongue peeks out between his lips for a split second. Ryuuga knows he won’t back out now. 

“Just one more thing,” he says. “Don’t call me Ryuuga. It’s Dougai to you.”


End file.
